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According to Catholic social teaching, the purpose of political society is to promote peace. By peace is meant the “tranquility of order,” as St. Augustine called it—that is, the serenity that results from people living in proper relation to one another, acting justly toward one other, and helping the community to thrive.   We call the order of people properly relating to one another social justice and the peace that results civil peace, or peace within a community. …

Having finished a full draft of this work, I began seeing other themes surfacing in the Book of Revelation—elements of war and weapon imagery, especially between the angelic armies and Satan’s. Then I looked through the Psalms and saw the same. Certainly one expects war elements in the Old Testament, as God’s people struggle to free themselves of pagan peoples who conquer and enslave them when they sin and disobey the Law. But what I was not expecting was to see worship associ …

As St. John says, “All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal” just as “there is sin which is mortal” (1 John 5:16-17). So what sin is mortal and what is not?  A mortal sin is one that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible. Unrepented, it brings eternal death” (CCC 1874). That’s what makes it “mortal,” or deadly: it cuts us off from God forever, unless it is “redeemed by repenta …

As we should expect, Mother Teresa’s idea of holiness was simple and direct. For her, sanctity begins with humility and ends with surrender to God’s will.  “You know, I’m only a little pencil in the hand of God, a God who is about to write a love letter to the world,” she was fond of saying.cii Mother understood that the path to holiness lies in following St. John the Baptist’s advice: “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30). She lear …

Let’s lay down some groundwork by considering why we act as we do. Unlike irrational animals driven by instinct, we have the power to determine what goods we will seek and how we will go about obtaining them. We are masters of our own actions. Those goods we seek are goals or ends, the things we hope to achieve by our actions. “Although the end be the last in the order of execution, yet it is first in the order of the agent’s intention. And it is in this way that it is a cause …